Overview
Each chapter is a theoretical inquiry into an aspect of poetics in an expanded sense—from the relation of experimental poetry to cultural logics of liberation and political economy, to questions of community and the politics of the avant-garde, to the cultural contexts where it is produced and intervenes. Each serves as a kind of thought experiment that theorizes and assesses the consequences of Language writing in expanded fields of meaning that include history, political theory, art history, and narrative theory. While all are grounded in a series of baseline questions of poetics, they also polemically address the currently turbulent debates on the politics of the avant-garde, especially Language writing, among emerging communities of poets.
In manifold ways, Watten masterfully demonstrates the aesthetic and political aims of Language writing, its influence on emerging literary schools, and its present aesthetic, critical, and political horizons. Questions of Poetics will be a major point of reference in continuing debates on poetry and literary history, a critical reexamination for already familiar readers and a clearly presented introduction for new ones.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609384319 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2016 |
| Series: | Contemp North American Poetry |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Questions of Poetics
Language Writing and Consequences
By Barrett Watten
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 Barrett WattenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-431-9
CHAPTER 1
The Turn to Language and the 1960s
Many dilapidated houses I explore
with my son,
on assignment to reclaim ...
a lost judgment.
— Under Erasure
I begin with a thought experiment that tries to show, using visual as well as textual evidence, how the "turn to language" that took place in experimental poetry in the 1970s continues the politics of the 1960s by other means. The textual politics of the Language school are often opposed to the expressivist poetics (Black Arts, Chicano, feminist, gay/lesbian) that emerged in the same decade, and for good reason. With the former, the self-presence of the expressive subject is under erasure, while for the latter, the formal autonomy of modernist poetics is rejected as a politics. My argument seeks a common origin or ground for such diametrically opposed approaches to poetry. Such a common ground, it turns out, conveys all the sublimity of a precipitous chasm between aesthetic (and political and ethical) choices. But, as in the 1960s, precipitous chasms are often constitutive grounds. To begin to construct a cultural politics of the 1960s that led, albeit in different ways, to both language-centered and expressivist poetics, I will take as point of departure a decisive moment that occurred during the Free Speech Movement (FSM) on Sproul Plaza, University of California, Berkeley, October 1964, as captured in the 1990 documentary Berkeley in the Sixties. I am using the context of Berkeley in the 1960s to suggest logics of subject position, horizons of agency, and possibilities of representation that were taken up (or not) by poets in the 1960s, and which were reinterpreted in the next decade. Connecting visual images and poetic texts with the film's cinematic tropes, I continue to frame the politics of the university and counterculture through Ansel Adams's photographic portfolio Fiat Lux, a lucid document of the university's modernist imaginary, and Allen Ginsberg's Indian Journals, which works through a poetics of alterity that entirely recasts Enlightenment's rational assumptions. Within the context of these historical frameworks, I then take up four nationally known poets who read on the Berkeley campus in the late 1960s: Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, and Robert Creeley. My primary aim is to construct a political genealogy for the radically formalist poetics that emerged after the 1960s and that do not immediately make political speech their central concern. Anyone familiar with Language writing will recognize Robert Grenier's "I hate speech" as a central moment in the genealogy of 1970s avant-garde poetics. If the transparency of speech and the opacity of language are often seen as diametrically opposed, how does it make sense that the FSM is a historical precursor of the Language school? In a direct sense, for both, language is implicated in power; but in a circuitous sense, in order for a horizon of language to coincide with forms and possibilities of poetry, a complicated negotiation between poetry and history had to take place. Those negotiations began in the 1960s, and they continue in an effort to recover the political origins of language-centered writing, the poetics of which are often represented as primarily textual. It is important as well that political struggles at the University of California have continued, renewed with the 2010 mass protests over the very nature of the university, making a direct connection to the prior moment.
Continuing the 1960s
The first moment in my derivation concerns the formation of the subject position of the student radical, who must take up a critical position outside the structure of the establishment while at the same time founding his or her critique on its inner contradictions. The student radical identifies with these contradictions, as both a product of the system and proof of its incoherence; there is an initially strong identification with the system's rationality as well as a refusal to accede to it. The following passage demonstrates, using documentary montage and the testimony of participants, the cultural logic of a moment I will call becoming outside. It begins with the narrative of Jack Weinberg, a former student who had been manning tables that distributed political literature, in defiance of the university edict not to do so on campus, and presents the perspectives of a politically "neutral" student (John Gage) and committed radical (Michael Rossman):
[Berkeley in the Sixties: The arrest of Jack Weinberg]
JACK WEINBERG: We set our tables up right in front of the Sproul Hall steps. [A] dean came up to me and he asked me to identify myself. And I refused to identify myself. And he said that if I didn't identify myself, I would be arrested. Well, it wasn't the first time that I had been threatened with arrest. Two policemen took me under the arms, so I went limp. They dragged me into the police car. And before I got into the police car it was surrounded with people. It was two minutes to twelve, there was this commotion going on, some people are joining in, some people are stopping to watch. This police car is going nowhere. [From inside police car] I just did what any of my fellow students, or my fellows in all these organizations, would have done, so I was just singled out, chance selected me out, I'm [not?] a martyr.
JOHN GAGE: I found I couldn't understand why people were prohibited from speaking in the plaza. And if this demonstration around this police car was some way to indicate it was wrong, well it seemed like a good idea to me. I didn't like the idea of seizing a police car very much, but it was certainly a peaceful seizing. People began to speak.
STUDENT, on top of police car: The only reason that I supported this is because I like Cal very much, I'd like to see it better. [Cheers]
GAGE: And they'd stand on the car. People were very careful about the car. People would take their shoes off and gently climb up on the car. They moved from the hood of the car, up onto the roof of the car. Then the argument raged: Are you with us, or are you against us? I wasn't either: I was watching, and listening to speeches.
WEINBERG: There was an open microphone on top of the police car, and anybody who wanted to speak could sign up on a list, and they had three minutes to say anything they wanted to say. And hour after hour people were getting up and orating. It was like an explosion of ideas.
STUDENT, on top of police car: Now Aristotle said, if you are not a citizen you are either a beast or a god. Now I asked you a very simple question. [Laughter; reaction shots]
MICHAEL ROSSMAN: People start talking, bringing in the Greek philosophers, bringing in the French Revolution, talking about all these ideas, constitutional liberties — as if they had meaning.
What is taking place in this sequence is the beginning of a radical identification that will end in alienating the student movement from the liberal institutions it tried to engage. The grounds for this engagement were, to begin with, the First Amendment, in the students' appeal to a constitutional right that was threatened in the denial or restriction of political speech on campus. Both the FSM and the liberal managers of the university claimed free speech and open inquiry as their rational ground; such a ground, which literally became the contested site of FSM rallies on Sproul Plaza, was coherent until precisely the moment when liberal rhetoric disclosed its underlying use of force — a moment outside the assumptions of free inquiry it represented. And, conversely, it is only in being delivered from the top of the police car — an act that clearly went beyond the bounds of rational debate — that the students' speech achieved meaning. For Ernesto Laclau, as will be developed, such a disclosure of the "outside" of reason destabilizes its ground; at a moment that seems instantaneous and unreal, a gap in the rationality of the system — a chasm where once was a ground — opened in Sproul Plaza before a crowd of witnesses. The attempted arrest of Jack Weinberg — who had been singled out, as he said, from any number of students who were manning allegedly illegal information tables — created such a chasm in the ground of rational debate that it had immediately to be taken into account by those witnessing it. By virtue of the attempt at exclusion, the subject position of the student radical is formed (as a chain of substitutions of many students for Jack Weinberg), founded on the right to speech (acted immediately on the roof of the police car) but that must see its claim to that right as a self-condemning violation, leading to its own exclusion (that speech is outside the law). At that moment, the student radical is constituted in terms of the right of speech, a loss of self that is identified with the arrest of Jack Weinberg, and the extension of both that right and its loss in a chain of equivalences that forms a group. It now becomes a win-or-lose situation, both politically and for each individual student, who must survive the attempted exclusion. The FSM inaugurated its politics around the excluded individual student; in the unfolding events, the students did succeed collectively in their objectives, making provisionally viable the subject position of the student radical.
Part of what enabled the students' victory was the blundering duplication of the galvanizing moment of Weinberg's arrest in the UC administration's refusal to allow Mario Savio to speak at the rally it sponsored as a call to order for the community. The contradiction between reason and force disclosed in the visible contradiction between the university's rhetoric and its actions could not have been more obvious, resulting in an exclusion that boosted the student radical subject position into a higher order of legitimacy and agency. Philosophy professor John Searle frames the incident from the perspective of the dissident faculty, which had grown impatient with the ineptness of administrators, from the nameless functionary who sets the agenda to university president Clark Kerr, who delivers a policy message of rational discussion that is immediately contradicted when Mario Savio is denied the podium through the exercise of police force, leading to an eruption of protest:
[Berkeley in the Sixties: Mario Savio prevented from speaking]
JOHN SEARLE: With the arrests [of student leaders] came a massive collapse of the authority of the campus administration. Now they made a desperate attempt to regain that authority in a big meeting at the Greek Theater.
ADMINISTRATOR: The departmental chairmen believe that the acts of civil disobedience on December 2nd and 3rd were unwarranted and that they obstruct rational and fair consideration of the grievances brought forward by the students. There are a small number of individuals, I regret to say, who are interested in fomenting a crisis merely for the sake of crisis. They hope that continuing chaos will bring about a total revolution and their own particular concept of utopia. [Mixed reaction]
CLARK KERR: The university supports the powers of persuasion against the use of force, the constructive act as against the destructive blow, respect for the rights of others, opposition to passion and hate, the reasoned argument as against the simplistic slogan. The academic world, and the people of this state, expect of us conduct commensurate with our past achievements and our high capacities. We should expect no less of ourselves. Thank you. [Scattered applause]
[MARIO SAVIO, with speech in hand, approaches podium]
CROWD: Speech! Speech! We want Mario!
[SAVIO tries to speak but is grabbed from behind by a policeman and dragged from the podium, as a reporter attempts to record his reactions]
VOICE-OVER, garbled: The police have got Mario ... they are pushing him away from the ... the police are pulling Mario away from the speaker stand! [Chaos and confusion]
STUDENT LEADER: He tried to exercise free speech, but when he stood up there, the police took him away! That shows the entire process that's going on on campus.
ADMINISTRATOR: We of course had no notion that Mr. Savio was going to try to speak at the end of this meeting. He asked — Just a moment. [VOICE: It's a lie.] Just a moment. [VOICE: You're twisted.] He asked — [VOICE: It's a lie.] Just a moment.
STUDENT LEADER: Just let him speak, you're killing yourself more.
ADMINISTRATOR: He asked me at the beginning of the meeting, whether he would be allowed to speak at this meeting. I said that he would not because this was a structured meeting not an open forum, and we had a program which had been approved.
In this passage, the disclosure of force that led to the eruption of speech in Sproul Plaza is repeated, but this time Savio's attempt at speech is denied and the administration's falsified.
Poetry as Political Speech
In the 1960s, poetry was likewise a site for the investigation of self-authorizing and/or self-negating acts at the limits of speech imagined as outside liberal society. Just so, the New American poets had labored in self-authorizing exclusion throughout the previous decade. It is no accident that poetry enters the documentary history of Berkeley in the Sixties with the appearance of Allen Ginsberg during the October–November 1965 Vietnam Day Committee marches from Berkeley to the Oakland Army Base. Ginsberg's performance as countercultural icon brought together poetry, politics, and religion in a moment of negation:
[Berkeley in the Sixties: Allen Ginsberg's political speech]
NARRATOR: Each attempt to stop the antiwar movement seemed to make our numbers grow. A month later a third march, far greater than the first two, finally made it into Oakland. [Music: Phil Ochs, "I Ain't A-Marching Any More"]
[Protesters march with banners into Oakland; a black woman on her front porch looks on, smiling; Allen Ginsberg appears on the back of a truck with loudspeakers, in white robes and chanting with finger cymbals]
WEINBERG: The whole national mythology was that Vietnam was a consensus war. It was bipartisan foreign policy, all significant sectors of the American public accepted the war, and the people who opposed it were marginalized freaks, kooks, you know, unimportant people. [Shots of large crowds marching under antiwar banners] It was a real statement for a person to say, yes I am willing to march out against the war. And when thousands of people did that, it broke that consensus. That was the function, that's what the anti–Vietnam War Movement [did], it broke that consensus.
CROWD: Bring the boys home!
BLACK DEMONSTRATOR, singing: You got to march when the spirit say march — [agit-prop band plays a Souza march, raucously]
REPORTER TO GINSBERG: Go ahead, just react.
GINSBERG: Well, what do you want? A reaction to what?
REPORTER: React to the greatness of the march, of the day, as a victory or what? Are you happy with it?
GINSBERG, into camera, singing: Hari om namo shiva, hari om namo shiva, hari om namo shiva, hari om namo shiva. [Looks at reporter and nods]
This sequence registers the early merging of the multiracial, community-based, utopian counterculture — represented by the black woman smiling and waving to the march from her porch, the raucousness of the black demonstrators and agit-prop band, and the truck carrying Ginsberg — with the student movement. Having earlier that year been crowned King of the May by the students of Prague, Ginsberg is again carried through the streets on the back of a truck chanting mantras. In his appearance as motorized guru floating above the crowd, Ginsberg is translating the role of King of the May, which he so recently performed as a liberatory act in Prague, to the very different politics of the Berkeley situation. At the level of language rather than image, he is also interpreting meditation practice on a public scale in an attempt, as he said, to deflect the violence of confrontation — between demonstrators and Oakland police, but also with the Hell's Angels. Ginsberg's biographers detail the absurdist politics of his summit talk with Sonnie Barger and the Angels, where all except Ginsberg dropped acid as he chanted calming mantras. The summit apparently had its effect, as did his discussions with Vietnam Day Committee leader Jerry Rubin, who decided that the mode of confrontation should shift to one of cultural celebration. The shift in political horizon from the radical student movement to the counterculture is thus figured through Ginsberg's style and presence. Where Weinberg and Savio enact negative moments of identity in Weinberg's attempted arrest and Savio's denial of the podium, Ginsberg performs his role as a positive figure of liberation and transformation — but the question is, liberation and transformation of what? In what way is the opaque language he is chanting connected to the politics of the Vietnam Day Committee?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Questions of Poetics by Barrett Watten. Copyright © 2016 Barrett Watten. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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